Practicing Technique at the expense of learning songs!!!

[eisenhorn]

Hi,

I seem to have a problem in that the majority of my practice time is spent developing my technique (primarily my picking) and I never seem to get around to learning any complete songs.

This is not helped by having to practice with a PodXt and headphones due to family and children etc, therefore not being able to play along to backing tracks, and by my not having anyone to jam with.

The thing is if I do learn songs then I feel guilty almost obsessive about neglecting my technique practice!!!!!!!

I suppose at the end of the day I feel that although my technique is slowly improving, that I am not achieving much satisfaction from my playing.

Does anyone else have this dilemma?

[Caffeinated Cat]

I play through headphones as well. Get a drum machine that plays bass lines and you can program all the backing tracks you want. You can plug your Pod into the drum machine and monitor it over 'phones. At least, I can do that on my Zoom RT-123 drum machine, I assume that most of them have the same feature. I'm sure you could also figure out a way of jamming along with CD's if you wanted to. I just put the CD in my computer and jam along without being plugged into an amp.



As far as technique, that's oddly addictive. You'll probably get sick of it eventually and start working more on songs. Then later you'll get sick of working on songs so much and go back to more technique. It's just what keeps it interesting. Every few months I get sick of practicing, and then I know it's time to revamp the practice schedule. More of what I find interesting, less of what I'm bored with. Or even find a new way to practice the same thing. Like instead of working on an exercise, work on a solo that contains whatever the exercise was teaching you. Exercises are just to help you play what you want to play, not an end in themselves.

[theox]

Yup. Only knowing how to play different exercise patterns makes a pretty boring guitarist, and hardly a musician.

There's of course the option to learn different songs that emphasize different techniques. This way we practice both our repertoire and technique at the same time.

[Bizarro]

I think you have to learn songs. Songs usually have *tricky* parts in them that aren't developed in most technique exercises.

I learned all of Extreme's Pornografiti about 15 years ago and it did great things for my chops, both rhythm and lead.

[eisenhorn]

Yes I think I may well check out the Drum Machine, also setting the task of learning say all of an album would be a good motivator as well.

Funnily enough I have the tab book for Pornograffiti, I love that album.

Thanks.

[Gandalv]

As Bizzaro said, practicing songs gives you a lot of practical, technical training. When you do exercises, you often practice motions that are rarely used in songs (except for improvising, of course). At least that's my way of looking at things.. And it's a lot more fun to play a nice song that pushes your limits than to play an exercise that pushes your limits. And more rewarding.

[btangel]

yea I ran into the same problem before. Shredding PG practice licks over and over and not learning any songs. Now I'm taking on Vai's Hand on Heart and I realize you learn a lot of cool things from that song. Sliding around accurately, doing soulful vibertos, and most importantly rhythm.

Basically what I do now is warm up for a good 10 minutes just stretching my hand out, then go through those shredding exercises or just random blues turnaround riffs for about 20 minutes to warm you hand up. Then the rest of the time I work on the song.

Good luck!

[eisenhorn]

Yeah, I think btangel has a good balance, I'll give it a go.

[Bizarro]

I also find that learning a challenging song raises my chops faster than exercises. I need to constantly learn things like that to keep my playing at a high level.

For example, I learned SRV's Scuttle Buttin' and that kicked my butt for a couple weeks getting it up to speed. After that I was a bit quicker on all my other stuff too. After awhile I'll slow down, even tho' I can still play Scuttle Buttin' fine! So I learned a Satch tune, and later an Yngwie tune, and later a Thorsten tune, and then.... Right now I need to work on something to get my chops up but I haven't found anything that I really want to spend 50 hours working on. Maybe an Eric Johnson song... Hmmm... :)

BTW, I only learn about 2-3 hard songs per year nowadays.

[rrhea]

I, too, have a PodXt and use headphones to practice. I am not currently playing with anyone, and I am also practicing mostly technique and no songs at the moment.

However, I do play with jam tracks quite a bit. It is ususally the way I end my practice because by then I am warmed up and it's a lot of fun so it leaves me feeling "up" afterwards.

I use the GuitarPort Online with my XT. It's $8 a month, which to me is not that much, and you get a ton of jam tracks and song tab to play with. Plus, you get some really cool licks and chord lessons, too. I use it mostly for the jam tracks and lick lessons.

Another thing I do is use Acid Pro (recording software) to play back drum loops that I can jam with. What's cool about these is, like a drum machine I can alter the BPM, and add bass lines, synth pads (which are great for practicing scales in certain keys), etc.

In order to use something like Acid and hear the loops over the headphones, you'll have to at least install GuitarPort software, but you don't have to subscribe to it.

Playing alone can be pretty boring and detrimental. Nothing replaces jamming with humans, but you can definitely use the computer to simulate it enough to keep and/or develop the sense of rythmn and timing necessary to play with others.

Ryan

[Unhorizon]

Instead of exercises try to practice songs that have a lot of the technique you are working on. For AP I practice Flight of the Bumblebee, Moto Perpetuo, Tumeni Notes, and Universal Mind (right now I work on those each a little every day, since together they cover basically every kind of AP situation you can find). For legato maybe Satch's power cosmic, or some other satch tune, also Steve Vai uses a lot of legato, I never noticed til I saw Live in Astoria but he does use a lot of legato. For sweeping you could probably pick something like Serrana by Jason Becker. For tapping you could choose either Eruption (duh!) or Midnight by Satch. All these song examples came off the top of my head so their are probably many other choices but as you can see working on technique does not always have to be about exercises. Finding a good song or even making up your own etude will not only increase your technique, but you will have a wide repetoire of songs.

[ashc]

On the POD + headphones thing, me too... I recommend using a cheap mixer (Behringer do some really good ones). Mine was ~£70 and is 4 mono + 2 stereo + 2 track feeds, sends/returns etc. I have the POD, a drum m/c, keyboard, DI from amp, CD player and my PC all hooked into that. It's a perfect practice environment - no more excuses for me!

AshC